Who is Earl?
You see, if you're unfamiliar with terms like URL (Universal Resource Locator, pronounced Earl), domain, HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) or even HyperText Markup Language (html), all this Internet stuff can be downright intimidating.
People need ways of doing things that they are used to. Have you looked through your telephone "yellow pages" lately? Some sections are pretty lengthy. Take for instance, say,
contractors. Finding one often comes down to "are they in my city," but that won't help you find the
right one for the specific job need.
Now look at the restaurants section. In most larger directories you can look, not only at restaurants in general, but for Chinese food or Pizza. It's organized by category, not just topic. Now, trust me, there are a lot more Web Pages than ads in your "Yellow Pages."
It would be impossible for someone to find the pages they want to if they didn't have the specific URL (address) before they started. Now enter the best little tools to come around in a long time, search engines!
These are programs that look
for you to find the Web Pages you want. Just "start" the engine, type in the stuff you want to find, and the program will give you any number of tailored choices (normally in batches of 10 to 25). These are not just ideas of where to go, but the full URL is there, ready for you to click on and "jump" to your page of choice. These "search engines" work in basically two ways:
1) The company (or pagewriter) specifies which categories they want to be found under (i.e., bad checks or check guarantee) and submits their URL to the "engine" operators and the web page is ready to be found.
This is similar to the phone book "yellow pages."
2) The "search engine" looks for itself at all of the Web Pages it can crawl through, looking for any text that it can find that matches what you told it to look for. These can, while accessing far more Pages, get some pretttty bizarre results.
For tailored searches that don't waste the Financial Professional's already beleaguered schedule, you can't beat the submittal-type engines. Here at The Green Sheet, and in particular in our On-Line version, we chose the following:
The New Riders' Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages
http://www.mcp.com
InfoSeek
http://www.infoseek.com
Starting Point
http://www.stpt.com/new.html
Remember, "surfing" is fun, and Search Engines are the "Wax on the Board".
[Go Back]
